Field Notes from A.I. Country
Field Notes from A.I. Country is a series of personal essays about moving to San Francisco in 2025 and trying to understand the strange new social world forming around artificial intelligence: the founders, investors, parties, rituals, delusions, and occasional moments of beauty. The series is inspired by Anna Wiener’s excellent and hilarious 2020 memoir Uncanny Valley, and I hope to write something similar for the A.I. era: part memoir, part comic anthropology, and part record of a city where everyone seems to be building the future and no one can agree on what it is for.
“Hello, Haley”
On the humiliation of enjoying the future.
The first time I took a Waymo, I was with my boyfriend Raphaël. We were both against the idea on principle, which is to say we had discussed its social harms at length and were now waiting for the autonomous Jaguar to arrive.
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Please Scan Me
Welcome to A.I. Country. Population: Everyone.
I moved from Connecticut to San Francisco in September 2025, following my boyfriend, a physicist who had been hired by an A.I. safety lab-company, a hybrid category that was new to both of us and seemed to contain, in miniature, the whole confusion of the place. I was happy enough to leave my job in a biology lab at Yale, where I made less than $40,000 a year and my responsibilities included beheading pregnant rats and culturing neurons.
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